Tuesday, September 23, 2008

A Few Steps Back, But A Few More Steps Forward

Signs of intelligent life on the left in Britain:

Principia Dialectica, among others, is backing "a counter-demonstration against a march in support of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hizbollah." The counter-demonstration is organized mainly by the Committee of Iranian Students. PD observes: "Stop the War Coalition are one of the sponsors of the march. They claim to be a peace group but the march they sponsor is not a peace march, it is a war march. It is a march in favour of the indiscriminate killing of Jewish civilians and the violent destruction of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of the bulk or even all of the resident Jewish population from Palestine."

The Internationalist Workers Tendency weighs in: "'Al Quds Day' was instituted by the Ayatollah Khomenei, supposedly in support of Palestinians, but in reality to promote the backward and murderous clerical fascist Islamic Republic of Iran and their Lebanese surrogates Hizbollah. It does nothing to help the cause of Palestinian national self-determination."

"Things have reached a point where Kabul’s chattering classes have begun to murmur among themselves that the Taleban should not be regarded as an insurgency, but rather a legitimate resistance force. And this is from the progressive, Soviet-educated academics and engineers who make up the backbone of the intellectual elite. Picture the debate in the teahouses of Kandahar, where the bearded, turbaned patrons may have just lost a family member to a foreign air strike.

". . .The proposed increase in troops will not enable NATO or the US-led coalition to hold territory; it will, however, give them the capability of launching more and more operations. This is not to say that troops should be withdrawn altogether. At present, it is only the radical fringe and the insurgents, who support this idea. Those of us who live in the real world understand all too well what would happen were the international presence to disappear. It would not be long before Afghanistan would be once again engulfed in civil war, with long-simmering ethnic tensions, historical grievances and political rivalries unleashed."

Brian Platt on the importance of getting the facts right on Afghanistan, here, and over at Registan, a thorough fisking of the recent silliness in the Atlantic Monthly, and more reasons why the Taliban is not the Vietcong.

Some good news from Reporters Without Borders: "Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association are overjoyed by today’s release of leading Burmese journalist U Win Tin after 19 years in detention. He emerged from Insein prison still dressed in prisoner clothes after benefiting from an amnesty announced by the military government for thousands of detainees ahead of elections promised for 2010."